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1.

Visiting Niagara Falls, Oscar Wilde remarked, "It would be much more interesting if they ran backwards." Any historical consideration of the Falls in fact reverses their current and the flow of time. In the late eighteenth century, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) and Elizabeth Simcoe (1766-1850) came to Niagara. Chateaubriand saw the Falls in August 1791. Elizabeth Simcoe arrived at Niagara in 1792; she visited the Falls on 30 July.¹ These virtual age-mates, both aristocratic, both artistic, both royalist, never met.² For Chateaubriand and Simcoe, Niagara Falls - site of conflux, boundaries and crossings - flowed with human as much as natural history.

Chateaubriand and Simcoe implicate Niagara Falls in the fate both of aboriginal peoples and settler colonies - la nouvelle France, the United States of America, and Upper Canada. The indigenous and the exotic coalesce and split in these authors because upheavals had already displaced native people from ancestral lands; because settlers were arriving, a population hoping to move from the pole of exoticism to that of indigenousness; and because war threatened between the United States and Great Britain over land yielded to the U.S. in the peace of 1783. War exoticizes by its declaration of difference - the taking of sides. Moreover, native people claimed the territory west of the Ohio River that the Americans coveted; Simcoe notes on 12 August 1794 that "the continuance of Peace with the U[nited] States [is] very doubtful" (133). The Frenchman Chateaubriand emphasizes the estranging singularity of his and his characters' experience, though he acknowledges the overlap between assertions of exoticism and the presence of the indigenous. Simcoe discovers and sustains points of comparison that connect the alien to the familiar, a habit of mind informed by a domestic ethos, by Picturesque doctrine and by imperial aspiration.

Chateaubriand wrote of the Falls in his 1797 Historical, political and moral essay on ancient and modern revolutions; in a letter to his mentor Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes; in his 1801 novel Atala; and in his Memoirs from beyond the tomb, published after his death in 1850. Simcoe kept a diary complemented by watercolour sketches. She never put it before the public. On 7 April 1791, the chevalier Chateaubriand left Saint-Malo and a France troubled by revolution that first intrigued - then threatened - him. Elizabeth Simcoe embarked from Weymouth, England, on 26 September 1791 as spouse of John Graves Simcoe, first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. The Canada Act of 1791 affirmed the existence of this province. It included all of Niagara Falls, which then consisted of three cataracts named Niagara, Montmorency, and Fort Schlosser. The British retained control over what is now the American side of the river.

2.

Chateaubriand's first published impression of Niagara Falls appears in his essay on ancient and modern revolutions, which he composed as an exile in England a few years after his North American sojourn. Chateaubriand confesses the impossibility of dispassion in addressing revolutionary themes. Chateaubriand's last chapter is called "Night among the savages of America." "I went to see the famous falls of Niagara," he recounts, "and I took my way among the Indian nations who dwell in the wilderness west of the American colonies" (290-291).³

In this night-piece, Chateaubriand describes the sound, not the sight, of Niagara: "At intervals, one heard the solemn roaring of Niagara Falls that, in the night's tranquility, passes from wilderness to wilderness and ceases among the lonely forests" (293). He claims that "the loveliest nights in Europe could not give an adequate idea" of such grandeur. This Niagara night is so exotic that it eclipses any precedent. Only personal experience, Chateaubriand's inalienable possession, can verify its effect. The traveler's sensibility renders him exotic to the reader deprived of any equivalent experience.

Exoticism is nevertheless what the reader ought, according to Chateaubriand, to envisage. North America, and the indigenes among whom Chateaubriand moves as an exotic, become what Europe cannot imagine, yet must: "Europeans, what a lesson for you! The same savages whom we persecuted with iron and flame, to whom our avarice has left hardly a handful of earth to cover their corpses in the whole continent that was, until recently, their measureless patrimony - these same savages received their enemy into their hospitable huts, sharing their miserable meal, their bed seldom visited by remorse, and they slept in front of him the profound sleep of the just!" (292). As Chateaubriand begins, revolutionary iron and flame afflict Europe. But he concludes in the mode of Rousseau, contrasting Europe's artificial morality with the purer ethic of ces hommes de la nature. The measure of the natives' nobility is their surrender to sleep while Chateaubriand keeps vigil, insomnia perhaps manifesting his intellectual election - the Hamlet-like relentlessness of his thought.

In "Night among the savages," Chateaubriand combines Rousseau's exaltation of primordial goodness with Rousseau's plangent self-pity to forge an identity between himself and native people. One common plight unites Chateaubriand and his hosts. The North American indigene, like the native of France, has been expropriated and must wander. Chateaubriand apostrophizes his hosts: "You have given me hospitality which I cannot repay. But I may give you the tribute of commemoration … Inseparable friends, in what portion of your vast wilderness do you live now? … Do you sometimes speak of the stranger in the forest? … Generous family, his lot has drastically altered since the night he passed with you. But nonetheless it consoles him, if (while he dwells on this side of the sea, persecuted by the men of his own country) his name, at the other extremity of the world, deep in that neglected solitude, is still pronounced with tenderness by the poor Indians" (294). Here exoticism and remoteness fuse with familiarity, for the native people and Chateaubriand alike have undergone persecution. But Chateaubriand's persecution isolates him.⁴ He is alone; the natives, recalled for their hospitality, their domestic loyalty and their magical proximity to Niagara Falls's memorable surge, form a family. The literate Chateaubriand imagines the perpetuation of his name in the oral culture of the refugees among whom he briefly camped.

The Falls also figure in Chateaubriand's "Letter written among the savages of Niagara," addressed to Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes, his mentor. Chateaubriand claims that native people rescued him. Trying to descend a ladder of vines, he almost fell to his death into the cataract, breaking an arm on a rock: "My guide, who saw me from above and to whom I made a signal, ran to find several savages who, with much effort, lifted me with birch-bark straps" (Oeuvres 696-697).⁵ The limestone over which Niagara Falls plunges has made an impact on the traveler's body. The exotic locale has changed him; he has internalized it as a fracture.

Chateaubriand's 1801 novel Atala addresses the French theme of Catholicism made indigenous in an exotic context. As in Chateaubriand's essay on revolutions, Niagara Falls appears toward the end of Atala. Near the Falls, the speaker of the novel's epilogue meets a mixed race woman, victim of the double exile of the Natchez people, expelled by the French in 1729 from the Mississippi valley. A second displacement followed the first when the English of Virginia appropriated land on which the Natchez had resettled. Chateaubriand renders his indigenes exotic by recounting these travails, yet he makes them more intimate to himself and the reader by disclosing the hybridity of blood and belief. But Chateaubriand portrays Niagara Falls as hyperbolically exotic: "Soon we arrived at the edge of the cataract … [I]t is not so much a river as a sea, whose torrents rush into the gaping mouth of a chasm … A thousand rainbows arch and cross above the abyss … Eagles, drawn by air currents, spiral down into the chasm depths, and wolverines dangle by their supple tails from the ends of low-dangling branches, seizing out of the abyss the broken corpses of elk and of bears" (Oeuvres 95-96).⁶ This spectacle suggests history's lurid chute, attended by scavengers - those implausible opportunists pendant from their tails, the wolverines.

In Atala, the cataract of history carries corpses, and reduces what was once indigenous to a harried remainder. The narrator of Atala's epilogue first notices his female interlocutor as she sits with a dead boy on her knees. She pursues the native custom of placing the corpse in a tree until it is desiccated, reduced to portable bones. Crossing Rousseau-like strains with morbidity, Chateaubriand expostulates: "Oh, how moving is this Indian custom! I have seen you in your wide desolations, proud monuments of the Crassi and Caesars, and I still prefer those airy Indian tombs … If the relics of a young woman have been hung by her lover's hand on the tree of death, or if a mother has placed the remains of a dear child in the dwelling place of little birds, the effect is only heightened" (Oeuvres 94-95). Chateaubriand emphasizes "relics." The mourning mother identifies herself and her people in such terms: "We are the remnant of the Natchez … and because my milk soured from grief, my baby died" (Oeuvres 96). Hardly has the child been placed in the tree than the mother must withdraw it, and move on. She has no time, no place to complete her ritual. The tribe's survivors cannot properly prepare their relics.

Preservation of relics is a universal practice. The personnel of Atala seamlessly combine native and European customs; Catholicism venerates relics no less than do the Natchez. The narrator of Atala's epilogue is asked to venerate the bones of the hermit Father Aubry: "O stranger! Here you may contemplate these remains, along with those of Chactas himself" (Oeuvres 99). Chactas the warrior and Father Aubry receive obsequies in accord with both indigenous and Christian faith.⁷ When the natives depart, "Those in front bore the sacred remains, while those in back carried their new-born infants" (99). Chateaubriand's narrator makes a gesture of identity with the aboriginal people of North America similar to the one the author ventured in his "Night among the savages." On that occasion, it will be recalled, the basis of the union imagined to link natives and the author was experience of uprooting and persecution.

In Atala, this proposal of identity occurs after acknowledgement of the degree to which indigenes and exotics have already blended. Indigenousness and exoticism mix in the condition of exile, in the pursuit of common religious rites and in exogamous love. The narrator exclaims: "Unlucky Indians whom I have seen wandering in the wildernesses of the New World with the ashes of your ancestors, you who showed me hospitality in spite of your own misery! Today I could not return your kindness, for like you I wander at the mercy of men, and, less fortunate than you in my exile, I have not brought with me the bones of my fathers!" (99). This exclamation affirms the narrator's solidarity with the native people whom he addresses: both exhibit profound filial feeling. Yet the narrator argues that his privations exceed those of the aboriginals because he has been bereaved of the relics of his past.

In Memoirs from beyond the grave Chateaubriand remarks, "I have set memories of Atala … beside the cataract of Niagara as an expression of its sadness. What does a cascade falling eternally in the impassive sight of heaven and earth amount to, in the absence of human nature, its predicaments, its travails?" (111).⁸ Chateaubriand assigns a single emotion to Niagara Falls, tristesse, and shares this feeling between native people and himself. What the melancholy Falls should witness is congruent human sadness. "The Scriptures," he says, "often compare a nation to mighty waters; this was a dying nation which, robbed of a voice by its death throes, was hurling itself into eternity" (110).

3.

Dying nations preoccupy Chateaubriand - New France, the Natchez, the ancien régime. Chateaubriand likewise laments the fate of Québec in 1759. He reflects on figures such as Father Jean de Brébeuf, who held a Christian service at Niagara Falls in 1640, and was killed by the Iroquois in 1649: "I gazed for a long time at this cataract whose existence was revealed to the old world not by petty travelers like myself, but by missionaries who … would throw themselves on their knees at the sight of some wonder of Nature and receive martyrdom as they completed their hymn of admiration" (Mémoires 111-112). Further from Oscar Wilde's depreciation of Niagara Falls an observer could not go. Yet Wilde might have approved of Chateaubriand's words. Martyrdom seems to be brought on coincidentally with aesthetic ecstasy. The missionaries' fate at Niagara Falls belongs to that class of absolute experiences for which Chateaubriand displays a preference: they fortify the claims of individuality against qualifying assertions of society and of similitude.

Like Chateaubriand, Elizabeth Simcoe arrived at Niagara Falls at a crisis in the affairs of native people. Her diary reflects current events. Her husband John Graves Simcoe hosted American Commissioners John Randolph, Benjamin Lincoln, and Timothy Pickering at Niagara for talks to establish the boundary beyond which aboriginal negotiators hoped to forestall United States settlement.⁹ The Ohio River was their preferred limit. On 4 November 1792, Elizabeth Simcoe reports,

The Indians make very long speeches at their Councils. One of them named Cowkiller spoke for 5 hours in a late debate between them & the people of the U[nited] States.
I have seen some translation of speeches full of well expressed fine sentiments, & marking their reliance on the Great Spirit. They appear to have great energy & simplicity in their speeches. (81)

Chateaubriand seconds Simcoe's approval of native eloquence, representing it with inflections influenced by James Mcpherson's 1763 Ossian.

Simcoe notes that Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Talbot "went with Coll. Butler to distribute presents to the Indians at Buffalo Creek. He bought a very pretty Fawn Skin of one of them for me & I made it into a Tippet. He also brought me a cake of dried hurtleberries made by the Indians which was like Irwin's patent Currant Lozenges but taste[d] of smoke" (81). This passage domesticates the wild pelt and the exotic foodstuff, translating them into familiar forms - a short cloak, a brand-name medicine. As a rhetorical strategy, the procedure resembles Chateaubriand's approach to Niagara Falls.

Elizabeth Simcoe is a writer of the eye trained in 1790s Picturesque imperatives which holds that each landscape differs from the rest sufficiently to captivate an observer who demands novelty. William Gilpin published an essay on the topic in 1794, while Simcoe was still in Upper Canada. He advised that the "first source of amusement to the Picturesque traveler is the pursuit of his object - the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to his view. We suppose the country to have been unexplored. Under this circumstance the mind is kept constantly in an agreeable suspence [sic]. The love of novelty is the foundation of this pleasure" (47).¹⁰ To go in conscious expectation of the new is to assimilate it to the known. The Picturesque traveler's aesthetic frame thus determines what he or she sees.

Simcoe at once assimilates the exotic Niagara Falls to famous - and, for her, indigenous - Picturesque scenes. "As I approached the Landing," she writes on 30 July 1792, "we were struck by the similarity between these Hills & Banks & those of the Wye about Symond's Gate & the lime Rock near Whitchurch in Herefordshire, which differs very little except in the superior width & clearness of the Niagara River" (76). Although Simcoe maintains distinctions between Niagara and Britain, awareness of such distinctions does not lead, as in Chateaubriand, to claims of incomparability. Simcoe conforms Niagara Falls to British landscape features. The template of Britain fits Upper Canadian novelties, without depriving them of freshness. For Simcoe, the exercise of Picturesque judgement - the collation of past and present landscape impressions (Wales, Herefordshire, Niagara) - is a social practice. Unlike Chateaubriand, Simcoe uses the first person plural. "We were struck by the similarity," she notes. Chateaubriand's reportage, by contrast, is that of the exceptional man.

"The falls itself," Simcoe continues, "is the grandest sight imaginable from the immense width of waters & the circular form of the grand fall, to the left of which is an Island between it & the Montmorency Fall (so called from being near the size of a fall of that name near Quebec). A few Rocks separate this from Ft. Schlosser Fall which passing over a straight ledge of rock has not the beauty of the circular form or its green color, the whole center of the circular fall being of the brightest green & below it is frequently seen a Rainbow" (76). Simcoe's careful account enumerates one rainbow. In Atala, Chateaubriand postulates a thousand of them - Niagara Falls becomes impossibly prismatic.

Simcoe describes a place like the one where Chateaubriand broke his arm: "Men sometimes descend the Rocks below this projecting point, but it is attended with great danger & perhaps little picturesque advantage"(76). The disparagement of the last phrase - "perhaps little picturesque advantage" - reflects what Mary Beacock Fryer calls Simcoe in this phase of her life: an "amused lady of the Age of Reason" (240). The Picturesque eye searches for compositions wherein traces of sublimity - "great danger" - appear chastened, reduced to proportion. Simcoe's mind domesticates as it works by analogy. She subjects the foreign term (Niagara Falls) to the influence of the familiar one (the Wye River). Chateaubriand's comparisons on the other hand, awe and estrange, making everything - the Niagara night, the natives - personal to his own displacement, loneliness, and sensibility. Like Rousseau, he boasts the curse of uniqueness. A reader imagines Chateaubriand and his characters as nonpareils, raised to that status in part by the inordinateness of their settings. Simcoe, though, settles the country, despite the menace of war with the States, by assuring herself of imperial continuities. Where exoticism is real, as at Niagara Falls, Simcoe notes, "after the eye becomes more familiar to the objects I think the pleasure will be greater in dwelling upon them" (77). Future-oriented, she intends to linger. She hopes Upper Canada will last.

Exoticism for Simcoe at Niagara comes, sometimes, in disruption but not suspension of familiar amenities: "This Evening I received some Letters from England brought from Montreal by Indians who hung the Packet so near their fire that the edges of the Letters are burnt & the dates illegible" (85; 8 June 1795). The post arrives, an institution by which correspondence is maintained. But this correspondence bears the mark of the exoticism of its transmission at the hands of indigenes. It is singed around the margins. Likewise, the Niagara River flows nearly congruently with Simcoe's native Wye - a river that William Wordsworth celebrates a few years later in "Lines Written above Tintern Abbey."¹¹

Picturesque doctrine in Europe favoured the marginalized - gypsies, banditti, beggars. To depict such people was not to extend great sympathy toward them; their appealing exoticism depended on their poverty.¹² Yet Simcoe complicates the force of the Picturesque: Upper Canadian circumstances alter its meaning. She often attaches the epithet "picturesque" to native people. In the 1790s, aboriginal figures, despite their "wild appearance," which allies them, for example, to gypsies, exercise authority far in excess of those whom they superficially resemble. Gypsies are not recruited to the defence of nascent colonies.¹³

On 28 August 1795 along the shore of Lake Erie (near Niagara), Simcoe reports, "One of the Servants went to the Lake to wash his cloaths. [My son] Francis followed him up to his knees in the water & sat on the Rock by him, presently an Indian went to wash his cloaths & the group looked very picturesque" (164). Francis is Elizabeth Simcoe's four-year-old son. Simcoe's term "picturesque" unifies three categories: servant, child, "Indian". Sidney K. Robinson's understanding of the Picturesque illuminates Simcoe's historical situation: "we see the Picturesque trembling between freedom and order, the uncomfortable middle position equally open to attack from both sides" (69). Servants and native people may pose a threat. The servant could rise up, as happened in revolutionary France; the exotic "Indian" could disrupt settlement. But clothes-washing is domestic. And Simcoe's child Francis offers an intimate figure for the future.¹⁴ Robinson remarks that the Picturesque "is located in the gap between full utilization of all resources and an apparently rustic poverty" (144). This is the moment when Upper Canada comes into existence.

For Simcoe, the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant or Thayendanegea fuses exotic and indigenous. She describes him at Niagara on 9 December 1792: "He has a countenance expressive of art or cunning. He wore an English Coat with a handsome Crimson Silk blanket lined with black & trimmed with gold fringe & wore a Fur Cap, round his neck he had a string of plaited sweet hay. It is a kind of grass which never loses its pleasant scent. The Indians are very fond of it. Its smell is like the Tonquin bean" (82-83). Brant's eclectic accoutrements make him a personification of historical change. Simcoe identifies his most exotic accessory, the sweet grass, with a known quantity. The Tonquin bean, indigenous to Brazil and Guiana, supplied scent for snuff and perfume. Unlike Chateaubriand's composite figures - the mixed race mother mourning her dead boy - Brant possesses real potency. He has a future.

Chateaubriand finds in Niagara Falls and native people images for melancholy and exile - exile as much internal as external. His tristesse, like that of Niagara Falls, precedes any stimulus, just as Oscar Wilde's wit waits for any pretext to display it.¹⁵ The exorbitant Chateaubriand analogizes himself with the exotic, and borrows the force of this exoticism to heighten his personal impact. Egotistical sublimity accrues to him. The adolescent Chateaubriand once imagined an ideal woman, whom he called his Sylphide: "in lieu of a real object, I evoked, by the strength of my vague longings, a phantom that never left my side. I do not know whether or not the history of the human heart offers another example of this nature" (Mémoires 71). Niagara Falls and the travails of aboriginal people substantiate Chateaubriand's early intuition of exceptionality.¹⁶

Simcoe makes the Falls the grand but manageable reach of an empire whose centre is indigenous to her. Native people, more likely to support British than U.S. policies, remain tractable to imaginative domesticating, their exoticism neutralized by the inclusiveness of the Picturesque. The strangeness that remains is stubborn: analogy can never be identity, or colony homeland. This discrepancy heightens aesthetic pleasure, and forms a subtle basis for local singularity.¹⁷

______________ NOTES

1.       Page numbers for Elizabeth Simcoe derive from Mrs. Simcoe's Diary, ed. Mary Quayle Innis (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965), but I have also referred to The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, ed. J. Ross Robertson (Toronto: Ontario Publishing, 1934).
   
   

2.       When Simcoe met French émigrés, her response was negative. She writes on 22 June 1795 at Niagara: "The Duke de Liancourt arrived strongly recommended by the Duke of Portland, Mr Hammond etc therefore Genl. Simcoe is obliged to pay every attention to him. He is attended by Mr. Gilmard, an Englishman, a French naval officer named Petit-Thouars & a Marquis de Blacon. Their appearance is perfectly democratic & dirty" (Diary 159).
   
   

3.       Page numbers refer to Chateaubriand, Révolutions anciennes et modernes (Paris: Dufour et Mulat, 1852). All translations from Chateaubriand are my own.
   
   

4.       The famous opening of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire likewise emphasizes the isolating effect of persecution: "Look at me, alone on earth."
   
   

5.       See Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesque et voyages, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
   
   

6.       See Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesque et voyages, vol. 1.
   
   

7.       The tragedy of Atala, the native heroine of Chateaubriand's story, arises from her misconstruction of a Christian oath made in her behalf by her mother. Atala's mother vowed the girl to virginity, in the name of Mary, Queen of Heaven; Atala died rather than compromise her chastity with her true love. Such love should have released her from the vow.
   
   

8.       I rely on Chateaubriand, Mémoires, ed. Claude Roy (Paris: Edition j'ai lu, 1964) and The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans. Robert Baldrick (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961).
   
   

9.       When the Commissioners left, Elizabeth Simcoe assessed their characters: "How glad I am to be rid of them. General Lincoln was civil enough, but Mr. Randolph is a Virginia rake, and Mr. Pickering is a low, violent, cunning New Englander" (quoted in Fryer 86).
   
   

10.       William Gilpin, "On Picturesque Travel," in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting. Gilpin canonized the Wye River as a tourist site in his Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty of 1782.
    
    

11.       In his 1798 poem, Wordsworth takes as his theme the way in which personal memory over time itself renders exotic those places that a visit once made familiar:
         And now, with gleams of half-extinguish'd thought,
         With many recognitions dim and faint,
         And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
         The picture of the mind revives again.
                        (59-62)
    
    Five years have passed, and the speaker of Wordsworth's poem compares his memory against the actual source of that memory. The discrepancy provides the argument for the poem. Elizabeth Simcoe, for her part, lives in expectation of change: the province has only just begun, but settlers are pouring in from points south and east.
    
    

12.       Raimonda Modiano has argued that, in a European context, marginal groups such as gypsies and the like "function [for the gentry] as … the repository of narcissistic desire without eliciting envy, for their very ordinariness and state of decay affiliates them … with the ruin, a perennial emblem of the vanity of human achievements" (196). In Upper Canada, however, native people possess greater power than Modiano's argument will allow. Aboriginal allies would remain crucial for the maintenance of Upper Canada's integrity until the conclusion of the War of 1812. Simcoe painted the rudiments of settlement with the devotion that artists in Europe expended on the remnants of the past.
    
    

13.       An 1805 phrase from Richard Payne Knight, a theorist of the Picturesque, quoted by Garside 146.
    
    

14.       Simcoe's son Francis died at the siege of Bajadoz in 1812.
    
    

15.       Wilde's joke about reversing Niagara's current typifies his temperament. As an aesthete, he consciously lives contra naturam, against the platitudes of "nature," in the spirit of the 1890s.

    Richard M. Chadbourne quotes a characteristic passage from Memoirs from beyond the tomb. Chateaubriand complains, "I have the spleen, a physical sadness, a true sickness" (quoted 105). What Chateaubriand suffers from, Niagara Falls shares.
    
    

16.       Just as no real woman could match Chateaubriand's Sylphide, so Chateaubriand's imaginary America may compensate for actual disillusionment. Richard Switzer writes, "There is much evidence to indicate that America was a vast disappointment to Chateaubriand … We are reminded of Proust's theme of disappointment with reality when it does not correspond with the preconceived notion conjured up by the place name. Chateaubriand most definitely knows what he was expecting to find in America, and he did not find it" (Chateaubriand 97). Switzer adds that Chateaubriand "built a new America which was precisely to his taste" (98). Simcoe has arrived among the builders of a new province, Upper Canada, and (her apprehensions apart) she takes pleasure in the province's communal inauguration.
    
    

17.       Simcoe's predisposition to make analogies of this kind does not restrict itself to that portion of her diary composed in the Niagara region. At Kingston, on 3 July 1792, she notes, "There are Mississaga Indians here they are an unwarlike, idle, drunken, dirty tribe. I observe how extremes meet. These uncivilized People saunter up & down the Town all the day, with the apparent Nonchalance, want of occupation & indifference that seems to possess Bond street Beaux" (Diary 72). A beau is the acme of European luxury; the drunken indigene is the decadent yet "uncivilized" remnant of primordial North America.

Works Cited

Campbell, Marjorie Freeman. Niagara: Hinge of the Golden Horseshoe.

Toronto:Ryerson, 1958. Chadbourne, Richard M. "Laughter from beyond the tomb." Chateaubriand

Today, ed.Richard Switzer. Madison: University of Wisconsin,

1970. 105-122. Chateaubriand, René-François de. Atala/René, trans. Irving Putter. Berkeley:

University of California, 1952.
______. Mémoires, ed. Claude Roy. Paris: Edition j'ai lu, 1964.
______. Oeuvres Romanesque et voyages, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Regard.

Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
______. Révolutions anciennes et modernes. Paris: Dufour et Mulat, 1852.
______. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans. Robert Baldrick. London:

Hamish Hamilton, 1961.
Fryer, Mary Beacock. Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe 1762-1850: A Biography.

Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1989.
Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque

Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a

Poem, On Landscape Painting. London: 1794.
Modiano, Raimonda. "The legacy of the Picturesque: landscape, property

and the ruin." The Politics of the Picturesque. Ed. Stephen Copley

and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994. 196-219.

Painter, George D. Chateaubriand: A Biography, vol. 1. London: Chatto

& Windus,1977.
Read, D.B. The Life and Times of John Graves Simcoe. Toronto: George

Virtue, 1890.
Robinson, Sidney K. Inquiry into the Picturesque. Chicago: University of

Chicago, 1991.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. S. de

Sacy. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
Sieburg, Friedrich. Chateaubriand, trans. Violet M. Macdonald. London:

George Allen & Unwin, 1961.
Simcoe, Elizabeth. Mrs. Simcoe's Diary, ed. Mary Quayle Innis. Toronto:

Macmillan,1965.
______. The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, ed. J. Ross

Robertson. Toronto: Ontario Publishing, 1934.
Switzer, Richard. Chateaubriand. New York: Twayne, 1971.